The University of Maryland is in serious negotiations to join the Big Ten Conference, sources told ESPN.com on Saturday.

If Maryland goes to the Big Ten, Rutgers of the Big East is expected to follow suit. The addition of Maryland and Rutgers would give the Big Ten 14 members as the league gears toward negotiations on a new media rights deal when its first-tier rights expire in 2017.

No date has been set for an potential announcement, though it could come as soon as Monday.

Maryland president Wallace Loh has been handling the conversation with Big Ten officials, a source said.

One source told ESPN.com that Maryland athletic director Kevin Anderson has informed key staffers that there are ongoing discussions.

FSU will watch the exit negotiations with great interest. The poor TV and Orange Bowl contracts might end up dooming the ACC.

Louisville for Maryland is a step up. Maryland-UConn is basically a lateral move. Maryland-Rutgers is a step down for the ACC, but for some reason the ACC wants Rutgers. I wonder if the ACC will consider Navy?

MattTheEagle wrote:Doesn't Maryland lose tons of $$$ if they leave? Haven't we upped the buyout?

If Maryland leaves, then why not just try to get Notre Dame as a full member? Then that would make the loss of Maryland an upgrade for the ACC.

Like HJS posted: "Nonetheless, the $50mm (while significant) is not prohibitive. If the conference you are moving to has a TV Deal $10-$15mm more than the ACC (which the B10 soon will) and if you are receiving twice the bowl revenues than the ACC (which the B10 does), the dispartity in revenues pays for the buy-out in about 3 years. The buyout makes it very difficult for a team to leave for the B12, but not so for the SEC or B10."

The bad, bad TV and bowl deals the ACC negotiated matter. Remember that Maryland voted against the $50 mill exit fee on "legal" grounds, you can bet they're going to contest it.

According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, the ACC’s addition of Notre Dame as a full member in all sports except for football irked top Maryland officials, because it broke with the conference’s traditional requirement that all members must participate in all sports.

According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, the ACC’s addition of Notre Dame as a full member in all sports except for football irked top Maryland officials, because it broke with the conference’s traditional requirement that all members must participate in all sports.

Heh, This is really the Big East 2.0.

No reason to think ND would get off of their high horse, but if the ACC was able to simply drop MD and replace them with ND should they become a full member that would be a major upgrade across the board. If ND wants to continue to be difficult, I would much rather see Louisville invited than yukon, they bring more to the table athletically while being comparable academically.

I suspect that UMD will leave if it can and if the negotiations don't fall apart outright... although this opens up an academic shitstorm for a few reasons which I'll explain in a minute.

First, though... anyone else getting the sense that this whole conference carousel is going to completely backfire? Specifically for ESPN? So... there aren't very many bomb-makers in Palestine. I'm not talking about the assholes who repurpose the rockets, but guys who make actual bombs. Bombs arent as big a part of their assaults against Israel for a lot of reasons, but one of the oddball ones is that they often cannot work with reliable materials and they cannot often work in proper bench environments, so it's really just a matter of time until one of these assholes blows his fingers or his fists or his skull off inside his lab because the shitty chinese cell phone he's hooking up has a faulty solder. Or someone taps into the basement plumbing and his ground suddenly terminates. etc.

Looking at the whole sweep of this - including our own departure which more or less kicked the whole thing off all those years ago ('its a done deal' - farrell) - I'm starting to think that ESPN is the bomb-maker and they're trying to build clockwork precision designs with some really unreliable materials. UMD is a great example - Maryland almost had its credit rating downgraded two years ago. The state's government has raised taxes on millionaires, has an albatross of really diverse statewide social problems hanging around its neck, and is at a major risk of losing disproportionately high amounts of revenue when the government has a CR, or a re-auth, or cuts jobs, or even when they cut contracts. The university system has had its profile take off in the past few years - interestingly, from 1999 - 2009, MD started attracting excellent out-of-state kids from VA, NJ, and NY, and that money, interest, etc., was one of the pillars that rocketed UMD up but since then, it's teetered on the brink of substantial tuition hikes, cut tons of programs from an athletic department that's losing money, and has fallen off the national scene after winning the NCAA bb title and two Orange bowls under The Fridge.

Is this a reliable partner for a business venture, or is this a bad-solder cell phone?

So... UMD Baltimore is a separate university. It has no undergrad programs, but has the graduate programs for medicine, law, pharm, nursing, social work, dentistry, and a handful of other stuff. The Baltimore campus is 30 miles up 95 from CP and it's run by a completely different set of people, different budgets, different needs, etc. Last year, someone in College Park noticed that if the two schools were to be stuffed under a single umbrella, the combined funding and rankings would make this new University of Maryland one of the country's highest ranking research institutions by profile, publication, dollars, I honestly forget what else. The people in Baltimore reacted, predictably, like the mob that attacked the Union soldiers walking from President St Station to Camden before the Civil War broke out - they have a totally autonomous and very specialized university (and accompanying programs - UMD Baltimore, for example, has a sweet biotech research park where Craig Venter's wife does some really interesting work, the medical school is one of the oldest in the country and has a wild and colorful history of important discovery and alumni, etc) and didn't want a bunch of assholes in College Park fucking around with their autonomy just for stupid paper bragging rights.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that a collection of the same assholes want some different paper bragging rights and are ready to jump into this without really considering the consequences - given the state of Maryland the state and the university, they're both a bit of a mess right now, and the Big Ten's interest tells me that they're making this decision for rash and stupid reasons and don't have anyone on the ground.

In the larger view of things, debt is cheap now, UMD could finance it and pay it down with the increased revenue from the Big Ten, but at what cost? They'll lag the rest of the schools for a few years having to pay down their debts, their student population and alumni have a Duke-hating sports identity that inexplicably runs far deeper than the anti-ND thing at BC and may just disengage completely from a Terps team that's playing in East Lansing and Urbana-Champagne...the school will also have to fire and hire and pay a new football coach in the next year or so, and in five/six years when the cost of the whole thing is back to break even, is it worth it?

I've been watching ESPN for years... years and years... and the descent from a sports network to a shitty entertainment network wringing pennies out of the lower-common-denominator has been dramatic and swift. ESPN is no longer in the sports business, it's in the ESPN business, but I think at the end of the day, people love sports more than they love ESPN. And ESPN - who gains the most from all of this conference shuffling - when it finally has four super-conferences and sits down to tell America that there are only 40 teams who actually matter and the rest will not be televised, ever, so get on the Iowa State bandwagon because they're in our preferred revenue conference... is probably going to find its tipping point. Further, if the SEC leaves the NCAA and forms a semi-pro league, then the whole thing blows up again, completely this time, and maybe it's the end of compelling football at schools that actually insist on educating students, I don't know.

Just my stupid, shitty $.02. I think this goes on for several more years, I think we (BC) end up in a Neptune-like orbit around the chosen schools with a distant seat at the table requiring a perfect set of conditions to actually make any noise, but I also think the shitty materials ESPN is working with - large state-funded universities suffering a massive and simultaneous funding problem and run by people who are lousy at managing money and just view the AD as a nose-holding arms-length cash register for funding comparative religious basketry majors - will explode in ESPN's face. Wringing pennies out of the mob is a great way to make money until one day the mob shows up with guillotines - better to choose proper partners and the long view instead of a local maximum that will collapse when too many people stand on it. UMD to the big ten stinks of local maximum.

In short, Maryland will leave - but the end of this that ESPN is attempting to broker is too insane and will isolate too many people - and the whole thing will backfire in their faces. In 10/15 years, the landscape will be totally, unpredictably different. And hopefully ESPN personalities will be in the halfway house with the real wives and the bachelors and the survivors, etc.

Last edited by TontoKowalski on Sat Nov 17, 2012 9:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I still think this is BS. It started with a Rivals site and I think the big names are chasing the rumors. Is ESPN going to pay a premium for MD and Rutgers? No. Is Delaney going to loan the cash-strapped Maryland the $50 million? No. The only way this makes sense is if the Big Ten thinks they can get all the cable companies in NJ and MD to pay a premium fee for the Big Ten channel. As Yes and the NFL Network learned, fighting that battle in major metro areas is a lot harder than trying to get all the rabid Big Ten fans to pay a premium in say Iowa or Ohio State.

No one gives a shit if MD and RU goes to B10. They suck at sports and (as BC knows too well) the moves for pure money reasons get panned (and B1G and MD are already taking a beating at the mere suggestion). The real problem here is that if this shit goes to 16, BC is royally fucked. We are talking NBE-level fucked. I do agree with those before who think this goes too big and then everyone goes back to 8 or 9. But, the nuclear winter of the in between will suck.

If this happens, call an emergency meeting to schedule two votes. The first to admit ND as a full all-sports member. The second to boot ND from non-football sports if they don't accept within one week.

dtwalrus wrote:If this happens, call an emergency meeting to schedule two votes. The first to admit ND as a full all-sports member. The second to boot ND from non-football sports if they don't accept within one week.

You can't uninvite ND. But, this shows how fucked it was to invite them in the first place.

The first thing you do is fire everyone in Greensboro. Swoffy ioaths same as Tranghese. Get him the fuck out!! Give someone insanely talented $2mm a year to figure out what to do next. UConn ain't resolving shit. Louisville??? They are better than MD, but... I'm thinking that there is another option. Bring in the right Commish. Get everyone to assign their media rights. Add ND as a full 14th member. Accomplish it by saying they get a full share and only have to play 6 conference games (basically just their division) and they get to keep their contract for the other 6 games. Then, figure out how you will be handling ESPN from this moment on. They either need to be viewed as an adversary or an arms-length vendor. Date rape ain't a relationship. But, the #1 most important thing is to make sure Swofford has no say on the next move... and make sure that you move quickly in bringing in the next commish (and make sure FSU is on board with the hire).

According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, the ACC’s addition of Notre Dame as a full member in all sports except for football irked top Maryland officials, because it broke with the conference’s traditional requirement that all members must participate in all sports.

Heh, This is really the Big East 2.0.

This laughable considering that even before ND, not every school participated in every sport.

Members of Maryland’s Board of Regents are awaiting a private telephone briefing – scheduled for late this afternoon – by university president Wallace D. Loh on the school’s proposed move to the Big Ten.

The conference call is in advance of a regents meeting on Monday to consider the move.

Regents heard about Maryland’s talks with the Big Ten over the past several days. Loh’s briefing today is believed to be an important step in explaining the school’s rationale for considering leaving the Atlantic Coast Conference, of which Maryland was an original member.